Adolf Heusinger

Adolf Heusinger (4 August 1897-30 November 1982) was the Inspector-General of the Bundeswehr of West Germany from 1957 to 1961 and the Chairman of the NATO Military Committee from 1961 to 1964.

Biography
Adolf Heusinger was born on 4 August 1897 in Holzminden, Duchy of Brunswick, in the German Empire. He joined the Imperial German Army in 1915 during World War I and fought in the 1916 Battle of Verdun and the following battles in Flanders. In 1914 he was awarded the Iron Cross, and he rose to the rank of Lieutenant after the war, remaining with the small 100,000-man Reichswehr army of the Weimar Republic. After the rise of Nazi Germany, he became a Lieutenant-Colonel and from 15 October 1940 to 25 March 1945 he served as Chief of the Operations Staff (third-in-command of the Wehrmacht), while serving as acting Chief of the General Staff in June 1944 after Kurt Zeitzler fell ill. On 20 July 1944, he was present at the meeting with Adolf Hitler and his top generals at the Wolfschanze in East Prussia. He carried out a briefing about the limited success of the attempts to reform Army Group Center and the inevitable loss of the armies in Latvia and Estonia, hoping to complete the briefing without having a Hitler outburst. However, Hitler shrieked at him, telling him that the German army would never withdraw. He stood behind Hitler during the meeting, and his aide Colonel Heinz Brandt delivered a report on the possibility of defection by Rumania and Bulgaria. Shortly after Hitler questioned Hermann Goring on the rigging of the Me-262 jet bombers, a suitcase bomb planted by Claus von Stauffenburg exploded and tore Brandt's legs off, and Heusinger was hospitalized. The Gestapo interrogated him, but failed to find any evidence that he was connected to the plot.

In May 1945, he was captured by Allied troops and tried in the Nuremburg Trials, and in 1950 he became an adviser to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer of West Germany. In 1955 he became a Lieutenant-General in the Bundeswehr of West Germany, and in June 1957 he was made Inspector-General of the Bundeswehr. In March 1961 he left office and in April 1961 was made Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, and remained in that post until 1964. He died in Cologne in 1982.